Monthly Archives: October 2007

Here I am linking to Maureen Dowd again. Actually she quotes another writer on Hillary and Bill’s peculiar relationship:

Caitlin Flanagan writes in The Atlantic [that Hillary is not]“willing to let us women in on the big, underlying struggle of her life that is front and center in our understanding of who she is as a woman. Her husband’s sexual behavior, quite apart from the private pain that it has caused her, has also sullied her deepest — and most womanly — ideals and convictions, for the Clintons’ political partnership has demanded that she defend actions she knows to be indefensible. To call her husband a philanderer is almost to whitewash him, for he’s used women far less sophisticated, educated and powerful than he — women particularly susceptible to the rake’s characteristic blend of cajolery and deceit — for his sexual gratification.

“In glossing over her husband’s actions and abetting his efforts to squirm away from the scrutiny and judgment they provoke, Hillary has too often lapsed into her customary hauteur and self-righteousness and added to the pain delivered upon these women.”

Flanagan’s assertion that Bill Clinton “used women far less sophisticated, educated and powerful than he” is pure pre-Monica feminism, meaning that there can never be “consensual sex” between a powerful man and a powerless woman.

I wonder how many of those who blame Monica (and the rest of Bill’s “seductresses”) would admit they are, for political reasons, “defending actions [they] know to be indefensible.”

…indestructible is the movies’ idea of the CIA. For years I’ve joked about those films in which some guy would be on the lam from the spooks, and he’d drive and drive and drive, switching vehicles, covering his tracks, but finally at some dusty one-stoplight town in the middle of a vast Kansas wheat field he has no choice but to pull over and risk using the only payphone in the county – and, as soon as he does, somewhere in Langley a light comes on and a computer starts to whirr, and next thing you know the phone booth goes ka-boom, much to the shock of the old guy nursing his cup o’ joe in the diner across the street. Yet no matter how much you scoff at the clichés Hollywood keeps peddling them. The recent Matt Damon movie The Bourne Ultimatum has a moment in which a reporter at The Guardian uses a certain word to his editor. The CIA, it turns out, are monitoring every cell phone in the world, just in case this one word comes up. It’s the name of the top-secret terrorist-rendition and torturing program they don’t want anyone to find out about. So, in an instant, they’ve got a tail on the Guardian man in London. He hails a cab, leans in to tell the driver where he wants to go, unaware that he’s telling the CIA also, because they’ve got a super-sensitive listening device. So they dispatch an asset to liquidate the Guardian problem once and for all. And not just some lone assassin. There’s a whole team swarming a London bus in rush hour. In the seconds before they close in for the kill, more agents appear, to disable the closed-circuit security cameras at the railway station as the assassin squeezes the trigger.

And this entire operation was put together in a foreign capital within minutes.

Where is that CIA when you need them? In reality, the Agency would be more likely to deal with the hapless hack by putting it about that Scooter Libby leaked something to him and tying him up in a Patrick Fitzgerald investigation for two years. As for the speed with which they swing into action, this is an agency whose head honcho testified three years after 9/11 that it would take another five years to rebuild the clandestine service. Imagine Wild Bill Donovan telling FDR that the OSS was an excellent idea and he’d be sure to have it up and running in time for the Korean War, or maybe the Cuban missile crisis.

The thoughts of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman represent the epitome of post-1972 Democratic pacifist ideology. In his and the Democrats’ world, the Republicans are fear mongers who are exaggerating the Islamic threat.

It’s not the Islamists we need to fear, he says, but rather “the unreasoning fear that has taken over one of America’s two great political parties.”

So let me get this straight: we do need to be afraid of “global warming” which may or may not produce negative consequences in some places sometime in the next century, but we don’t need to be afraid of jihadists who have already murdered thousands of innocent people and a nuclear armed Iran (sometime within the next decade if something isn’t done to stop it) which has threatened Israel with annihilation.

Liberals are so invigorated by the story about a noose being found on an obscure Columbia University professor’s door that now nooses are popping up all over New York City. Liberals love to make believe the Night Riders are constantly at their doors.

I’ll be shocked by a noose appearing on a college campus the day an actual racist does it.
Could Columbia at least produce one student or professor who supports racism before holding another “rally against racism”? Every concrete example of the racism allegedly sweeping the nation’s campuses keeps turning out to be a fraud. Far from “institutional racism,” there is “institutional racial hoaxism” run amok in this country. Will anyone rally against that?

Out of legions, here are just a few hoax hate crimes on college campuses.

In 1997, at Duke University, a black doll was found hanging by a noose from a tree at the precise spot where the Black Student Alliance was to be holding a rally against racism. Two black students later admitted they were the culprits and were immediately praised for bringing attention to the problem of racism on campus. Indeed, four years later the president of Duke gave a baccalaureate address nostalgically describing the hoax as a “protest” against racism. Next stop: the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2003, vile racial epithets were scrawled on the dorm room doors at Ole Miss, producing mass protests and a “Say No to Racism” march. And then it turned out the graffiti had been written by black students, against whom no charges were brought. A “Say Yes to Racism” rally at Ole Miss was later canceled due to lack of interest.

In 2005, obscenity-laced racist and anti-Semitic messages appeared on dormitory walls at the College of Wooster in Ohio. The fliers were instantly blamed on “typical white males,” even though all the letter I’s in the epithets were dotted with little hearts. Breadcrumbs left by the culprits included the message “Vote Goldwater” among the obscenities. The matter was dropped and flushed down the memory hole when the perpetrators turned out to be a group of leftist students led by a black studies major.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about the Democratic debates,” Rudy Giuliani said, “but they never use the word ‘Islamic terrorist.’ Ever.”

“They have a very hard time getting those words out of their mouth,” he continued, to the delight of his listeners. “I think it’s quite clear to me now, having listened to seven or eight of their debates, that they think it’s politically incorrect to say the words. I don’t know exactly who they think they’re offending. I don’t know what kind of view of the world they have. I understand when I say ‘Islamic terrorism,’ I’m not offending all of Islam. I’m not offending all of the Arab world. I’m offending exactly who I want to offend and making it clear to them that we stand against them.”

…He went through his greatest hits: The time he yanked Yasir Arafat out of Lincoln Center during a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. “The thing that really bothered me was, he didn’t have a ticket,” Rudy recalled. “He was a freeloader!”

The time he tossed back a $10 million check for 9/11 families from the Saudi prince who urged America to “adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.”

“You know, Israel’s not perfect, and America’s not perfect, but we’re not terrorist states,” he said.

There has been much discussion about liberal Rudy stances on guns, gays, abortion, divorce and comic cross-dressing that are well-suited to Manhattan but not to G.O.P. primary voters. But there’s also his bearhug with Israel, so hearty that even W.’s embrace seems tepid in comparison.

But Rudy seems out of the Republican mainstream on even giving lip-service to Palestinian aspirations. He has no patience for buttering up the Arabs, or the Republican men’s club attitude represented by Saudi-loving Bush senior and James Baker that has always favored a more “even-handed” policy in the Middle East.

Mr. Baker once reportedly justified the tough policy of the Bush 41 administration toward Israel with the notorious comment to a colleague: “[Expletive] the Jews. They didn’t vote for us anyway.”

W. blew off the Baker-Hamilton panel suggestions on Iraq that urged the administration to aggressively referee the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, to begin negotiations with Iran and Syria and called for Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria. Imagine what Rudy would do.

…“We need to isolate the terror-funding theocrats in every way possible,” he told the Jewish hawks, during a rant on Iran. “And we must end direct and indirect investment until they change their course.”

Rudy lambasted Hillary and Obama for their “strong Democratic desire to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate and negotiate,” and suggested again that he would be tougher on Iran than Hillary, and would never let it get a nuclear weapon.

Last night, when he and Judi were interviewed by Fox’s Sean Hannity, Rudy ratcheted it up, saying that Hillary’s “ambiguity” and “shifting of position” on Iran was “a dangerous tendency, I think, in somebody that aspires to take on a position where you have got to be pretty darn decisive.”

He also bored in where Obama has been skittish about going: her experience. “Honestly, in most respects, I don’t know Hillary’s experience. She’s never run a city. She’s never run a state. She’s never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people.”

…There is nothing in what Ann Coulter said to a Jewish interviewer on CNBC that indicates she hates Jews or wishes them ill, or does damage to the Jewish people or the Jewish state. And if none of those criteria is present, how can someone be labeled anti-Semitic?

What damage has she ever done to Jews? What is wrong with a person believing that it would be better if another person adopted their faith? Is there one liberal who doesn’t believe that a conservative would be better — “perfected,” if you will — by embracing liberal beliefs and values? Why is it laudable for a liberal to hope that conservatives convert to liberalism, but dangerous and hate-filled when a Christian hopes that Jews or anyone else will go to heaven (that is, after all, Ann Coulter’s and most other Christians’ primary concern) by believing in Jesus?

There is also a move to boycott Ann Coulter, so dangerous are her words. Of course, there is no such Jewish or liberal boycott of former President Jimmy Carter, who has done real damage to the Jewish people by describing Israel as an “apartheid” state in the very title of his anti-Israel book. In fact, Carter was invited to speak on his loathsome book at Brandeis University, an ostensibly Jewish university. But for many Jews and liberals, real hatred, real damage to Jewish security can only come from the right, especially from Christians on the right. So Ann Coulter, who has done nothing in her life to compromise Jewish welfare, is to be boycotted, but Jimmy Carter is worthy of invitations to speak. Jewish groups even invite John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, the authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” which is essentially a tempered modern-day version of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” But Ann Coulter is beyond the pale. And she said nothing to harm Jews.

She said she believes that Jews who accept Jesus as their savior are “perfected.” I fail to see why this is some form of hate-speech, let alone the basis of anti-Semitism, as stated by Abe Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, which often defames conservative Christians, whom he and his organization hold to be the greatest domestic threats to America.

As a practicing Jew, I do not agree with Ann Coulter’s theology any more than those attacking her do. But I am neither offended by her nor frightened by her or her beliefs. She believes that Christianity is better than Judaism. So what? Why is that in any way different from liberals thinking that liberalism is truer and morally superior to conservatism? Or conservatives thinking that their values are superior to liberal values?

Liberals not only believe that conservatives are philosophically imperfect, but they often believe that conservatives are bad human beings (something in no way implied by Coulter about Jews). Howard Dean has said that conservatives don’t care about children who go to bed hungry. Liberals yearn for a world without conservatives at least as much as most believing Christians want a world without non-Christians. The difference is many liberals are immeasurably more likely to impose their views on others than Christian Americans are. Liberal judges impose their views — e.g., on same-sex marriage — on society. And liberal educators force young students to watch Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the former vice president’s hysterical beliefs about impending doom — and offer no countering viewpoint.